Flying Off the Handle

I suspect many of Dalrymple’s readers shared his horrified reaction to the recent physical attacks made on managers of Air France by an angry mob after Air France announced a round of layoffs. Besides the attacks themselves, Dalrymple was also outraged by the reaction to the news by commenters at the Guardian website.

There was an incipient bloodthirstiness about the commentary that was horrible. It expressed a rage not so much against the managers of Air France (how many of the people who expressed themselves thus can really have known the situation in any great detail?) but against the world. They were dissatisfied, therefore they were angry, therefore they were right. Their rage was cosmic, so to speak, and only momentarily directed at the managers of Air France. Tomorrow it will be directed at something else, but the emotion will be the same and just as strong. If the 2,900 employees of Air France were to get their jobs back tomorrow, it would not assuage the underlying fury, not in the slightest, not for a moment.